This is untrue. On a cold winter morning in, say, the british isles, get a caucasian angry. Because caucasian ears+faces turn hot+red when they are angry, you CAN sometimes actually see a small amount of "steam" (vapour). Seriously. It cracked me up. I live in the British Isles (specifically, Scotland, the coldest part) and I've never seen this.
Finally an appropriate thread to ask this in. Could someone please explain why Russian smileys have no eyes, and typically multiple chins? Because many people in Eastern Europe really look like that... the radiation from Chernobyl had a devastating effect on the populations there.
Japanese animes also show a character who's under stress having a huge cross attached right from his forehead, or suddenly disappearing eyeballs and long black dashes coming out of the characters face. Anyone seen that on an actual real human, or it just me. If you step back and take a detached look at Western (or more specifically, American-influenced) animation, you'll note that there are a number of conventions which don't really reflect reality per se. (For example, no-one ever had steam coming out of their ears when they got angry). It just happens that the Japanese ones look strange to you because you're not familiar with them.
Humorous comics in general use a number of conventions and visual language which are almost second-nature to us- but only because we're used to and have grown up with them.
I had no way of knowing where you came from and I didn't lecture you. I was merely trying to express an understanding of your position. FWIW, the original point (which I should have made somewhat more clearly) was that American society's reaction to and mentality towards terrorism is still specifically theirs. Your circumstances and psychology towards your country and attacks on it are both different to (e.g.) the UK; partly due to history and partly due to the different cultures. Even when there is a shared experience, reactions and perspective will vary.
I took offence because you jumped to (IMHO) an unwarranted conclusion. The implicit assumption seemd to be that anyone in a country affected by terrorism would/should react in the same way as the US did, and if they didn't it was because they hadn't experienced it themselves. Yes, I probably reacted a bit strongly, but things often come across differently in cold, hard text.
Personally, I don't think it was meant as a troll. I just think that it was badly thought out and presented. AFAICT they just cut and pasted the HTML code that the poll-site generated for them.
I can see how you might not be able to relate to it if you don't live in the US or other country affected by terrorism. I live in the UK, which most certainly *is* a country that has been affected by terrorism. Nothing remotely on the scale of 9/11, but I'm sure that you're aware of the July 7 London bombings and other significant failed attempts.
I'm sure you're also aware of the many IRA bombings from the 1970s onwards. In one notable attempt, the IRA directly attempted to kill senior members of the British government (including the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher), and came very close to succeeding. It's interesting to speculate on what the US response would be to a similarly-close attack on senior government figures... and the effect on diplomacy if the UK government were as permissive towards that organisation as the US was towards the IRA, even after the Brighton bombing.
In short, please spare me the lecture. I may not have been personally affected by terrorism, but neither have 99.9% of Americans.
Nevertheless, BG doesn't take a pure pro-US position, but rather tweaks people in the US a lot. I didn't say it took a pure pro-US position, I said that it reflected US concerns. And I was specifically talking about the pilot movie, as I haven't seen the rest of it.
Of course, the war in Iraq is at least as important as 9/11 in shaping these analogies. Perhaps, but the introductory movie I was discussing only went out in late-2003, before Iraq had got into the state it is now, and I suspect the original outline and story arcs were created earlier than that.
Look, I loved Babylon 5. I even liked season 5, and consider the hate it gets to be typical mobthink (notice how other fans always append "except season five" like a mantra). I can assure you that I was quite capable of being disappointed by the fifth season without anyone else's input.
It suffered because JMS was forced to move the main story-arc's endings to season four, leaving season five feeling like it had been tacked on. I appreciate that some storylines/hanging threads were left for season five as originally intended, but the main story was over, and the impetus was no longer there.
It took something like five seasons for you to realise that? I had the original pilot movie out on DVD rental. Even then it should have been transparent to anyone with one eye and half a brain that it was a product (and reflection) of American society's post-9/11 neurosis about terrorism and religious fundamentalists.
Anyway, I didn't enjoy watching this, and stopped before I got to the end. Aside from find it somewhat depressing, part of the problem is that it specifically reflected American society, and not being from there it didn't speak to me personally. I could see the psychology behind it, but it wasn't mine.
It's a problem with sci-fi in general; when it reflects society, it's generally American society. The aliens are generally metaphors for other human cultures, but are nevertheless portrayed aliens, as seen from an Earth (i.e. U.S.) perspective. Fundamentally, Babylon 5 (which I was quite a fan of at the time) is the same.
Of course, big-budget sci-fi generally costs a lot of money and has to please its largest market. That's understandable from a commercial point-of-view, and they're free to do this; it just doesn't resonate that much with me. Actually, I don't think it's the idea of American sci-fi I hate per se; rather it's that sci-fi is generally American by default. That, and the genre's predilection for cheesy dialogue, wooden acting and visual cliches. I could fill another post with that though:-6
This poll is flawed anyway, because it's not absolutely clear that clicking on one automatically casts a vote. I clicked both to see what they were about, and discovered that I'd already "voted" for HD-DVD. FWIW, I don't know either way, so I wouldn't have voted at all.
...why they would name a format (Blu-Ray) with a name so close to the English word "blurry". The subconscious connection is too easily made, IMHO That's not to mention the other obvious (to me anyway) misinterpretation. Who is Ray, and why do we care if someone blew him?
Come on.... it's staring you in the face. I can't believe they didn't consider that one.
Just give me a 150 megabit internet connection already, and to hell with trying to tie data to clunky physical mediums. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of DVDs...
Nah, I'll stick with natural. This artificial stuff tastes too much like plastic If this takes off, all the vampires'll be going around trying to figure out which humans are "organic" and which have the plastic stuff in their blood. You can't tell just by looking. Hey!..... I know a song about that.
# A man lives at the corner of the street,
And his neighbors think he's helpful and he's sweet,
'Cause he never swears and he always shakes you by the hand,
But no one knows he really is a plastic man. #
# He's got plastic heart, plastic blood and veins
(Yeah, he's plastic man)
He's got plastic knees and [eh, sod this I can't make it rhyme and Ray Davis is going to sue me]. #
Okay; you got me there, you evidently know more about the 2600 market than me:-) Interesting insight, BTW....
Though, yes, I'm sure that the *old* machines continued to sell in small but steady quantities, but the Lynx and the Jaguar (and the Falcon) were not roaring successes. And the marketing of those old machines was very much on the "milking" side; e.g. when they launched the XE Games System (based on the 65XE, a 400/800/800XL-series machine in a new case), they just relaunched it with three or four-year-old games. Not exactly competing with Sega and Nintendo in the console market.
And they sold the XEGS instead of the 7800 here (in the UK) after changing their minds.... although circa 1989/90, I saw the 7800 on sale in some places anyway (don't know what was going on there). The XEGS was never a major success, but then it was really just a cheap repackage of their existing line.
The Lynx was a great machine; despite its battery problems, it might have done well if it had been marketed better.
Then they released the Falcon, a pretty powerful successor to the ST line which was nonetheless clearly destined to fail; even at the time (1992) this was obvious.
Then they stopped making the Falcon after... not very long so they could concentrate on the Jaguar. And IIRC that suffered from delays; it might have done reasonably well prior to the PS if it had left the gate on time, at full speed. Obviously, it didn't:-)
The Intellivision was only 2 years later than the 2600. (Its test market was in 1979.) It wasn't discontinued until 1991. That gave it nearly as long to compete as the 2600, yet it only captured about 1/4 the market that the 2600 did. Yes, but the market that the 2600 (and presumably) Intellivision was in went down after 1983. I know that the 2600 was still being sold in the late 1980s, but that was as a "budget" product and- I assume- reliant mainly on its back catalogue.
The two years that you mention were during that market's heyday.
That statement belies the fact that Atari sold 40 million 2600's, and probably about as many computer systems. Atari could sell, they just couldn't execute new products after their original line. Yes; I originally intended to qualify that with something like "from the mid-80s onwards". Although the ST did enjoy some reasonable success in Europe until the Amiga was cut to a much more reasonable price (and it remained the de facto standard music computer until well into the 1990s).
Some people like to whine about the clutter of having both a DVD player and a game system near their tv. Aside from clutter, there's having to faff about with extra connectors (and switch-boxes, etc, if your TV doesn't have enough sockets), leads, and power supplies, etc. If you're not a diehard gamer/DVD addict, a convenient all-in-one box is much nicer. Whining? Matter of opinion...
The Colecovision and Intellivision both had better graphics than the 2600. They didn't capture nearly the market that the 2600 did. They came out much later, so had less time to sell, and did so in the face of an established console with a large established library of games.
The Neo Geo has the best 2D graphics available anywhere. It did not displace the SuperNES. The Neo Geo was very expensive; it used (IIRC) basically the same technology as arcade games and AFAIK was never intended to be a mass-market console (it couldn't have been at that price anyway).
The Atari 7800 had better graphics than the NES. It failed. The 7800 was put on hold after the video game crash; they only revived it after Nintendo had shown that they *could* make a success of their NES, by which time they had a head-start. Also, regardless of anything else, Atari couldn't sell ice-cream in a heatwave.
Don't tell the market what the market once, let consumers decide. Who is the "market"? There is not one homegenous market, there are many. And there are many different niches to be filled out there.
So, when you say "let consumers" decide, do you mean the mainstream users or Linux enthusiasts?
If it's the latter, then Dell aren't going for that market. If the former, then what most of them want and will expect (as others have pointed out) will be the ability to run Windows software without major hassle.
Although theoretically WINE is a solution to this, in practice (as others have said repeatedly throughout this thread) it is far too complicated and not reliable enough for people who "just want to run" their windows apps. If it's sold on this basis, then it's going to backfire horribly.
I was under the impression that AOL has been trying to kill ICQ for years now. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to simply merge the services and brands, possibly retaining two distinct interfaces/protocols (to avoid losing users of one or other set of legacy clients) but effectively just having one service?
Um, where in central europe? ICQ isn't the predominant IM protocol for all central europe. In the Netherlands It depends how you define "Central Europe"; I always thought that the Netherlands was a Western European country, but not Central European. (Then again, Western Europe seems to include every country that used to be on the free side of the Iron Curtain).
According to this definition, the Netherlands isn't part of Central Europe. Meeehhhh.... the definitions aren't precise anyway, nothing worth arguing about I guess. I think the GP probably meant more like the Czech Republic (AKA Czechia) - which is what I would consider Central Europe- where another poster said ICQ was popular.
Heck, they even had a crossover between the Hellraiser and Prophecy film franchises! To be fair, that's apparently an unofficial (and short) fan-flick, and I didn't include it in my list of "Hellraiser" films. As for Prophecy, I'm not entirely sure that I've even heard of that one, ditto Kari Wuhrer:-)
Ethics are personal. You have to live with YOURSELF after you leave that job regardless of how bad the job was.
If you CAN live with yourself behaving as described (what I personally would call an unethical manner, but to each his own) then that is *your* true level of ethics.
It is unfair to use the other parties ethics to artificially inflate your own. In other words, saying you are being ethical when compared to the unethical practices of your employer is complete bunk. You are ethical in only one comparison: to yourself. Your argument is flawed because you're not comparing like with like.
If you (a) give money to charity, but (b) also kick a cute puppy each month, then you're right that it doesn't matter whether your employer is worse than the Mafia, or the kindest people on the planet. You'll look good next to the Mafia-alikes, and bad next to the other guys, but your own standards shouldn't change. You're doing the same thing in either case.
On the other hand, if you're screwing your employers, it's not the same. It's screwing over people who can- and will- do whatever the hell they want to other people whether it's right or wrong because they can get away with it, versus screwing over the salt of the earth. Now, your ethical standards may demand that you treat everyone equally, regardless of their actions, but mine don't; and it's notable that the concept of "punishment" doesn't either. Locking people up in prison only if they've done something "wrong" is selective.
You may (rightly) argue that the law should be the only method of punishing wrongdoing (or perceived wrongdoing). However, the law is not perfect and often works out as "what you can get away with". You can bet that the evil Mafia-like employers will exploit this to screw over their employees, so why shouldn't the position be reversed?
Anyway, this is verging towards one of those up-its-own-arse pseudo-logical keyboard-authority Slashdot discussions on morality, so I think I'll stop myself there.
And if your employer really *is* the Mafia, it's probably not a good idea to screw them over:-O
Slashdot Mirror
Humorous comics in general use a number of conventions and visual language which are almost second-nature to us- but only because we're used to and have grown up with them.
The goatse emoticon:
(=O=)
or what about
=(3OE)=
I took offence because you jumped to (IMHO) an unwarranted conclusion. The implicit assumption seemd to be that anyone in a country affected by terrorism would/should react in the same way as the US did, and if they didn't it was because they hadn't experienced it themselves. Yes, I probably reacted a bit strongly, but things often come across differently in cold, hard text.
Personally, I don't think it was meant as a troll. I just think that it was badly thought out and presented. AFAICT they just cut and pasted the HTML code that the poll-site generated for them.
I'm sure you're also aware of the many IRA bombings from the 1970s onwards. In one notable attempt, the IRA directly attempted to kill senior members of the British government (including the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher), and came very close to succeeding. It's interesting to speculate on what the US response would be to a similarly-close attack on senior government figures... and the effect on diplomacy if the UK government were as permissive towards that organisation as the US was towards the IRA, even after the Brighton bombing.
In short, please spare me the lecture. I may not have been personally affected by terrorism, but neither have 99.9% of Americans. Nevertheless, BG doesn't take a pure pro-US position, but rather tweaks people in the US a lot. I didn't say it took a pure pro-US position, I said that it reflected US concerns. And I was specifically talking about the pilot movie, as I haven't seen the rest of it. Of course, the war in Iraq is at least as important as 9/11 in shaping these analogies. Perhaps, but the introductory movie I was discussing only went out in late-2003, before Iraq had got into the state it is now, and I suspect the original outline and story arcs were created earlier than that.
It suffered because JMS was forced to move the main story-arc's endings to season four, leaving season five feeling like it had been tacked on. I appreciate that some storylines/hanging threads were left for season five as originally intended, but the main story was over, and the impetus was no longer there.
It took something like five seasons for you to realise that? I had the original pilot movie out on DVD rental. Even then it should have been transparent to anyone with one eye and half a brain that it was a product (and reflection) of American society's post-9/11 neurosis about terrorism and religious fundamentalists.
:-6
Anyway, I didn't enjoy watching this, and stopped before I got to the end. Aside from find it somewhat depressing, part of the problem is that it specifically reflected American society, and not being from there it didn't speak to me personally. I could see the psychology behind it, but it wasn't mine.
It's a problem with sci-fi in general; when it reflects society, it's generally American society. The aliens are generally metaphors for other human cultures, but are nevertheless portrayed aliens, as seen from an Earth (i.e. U.S.) perspective. Fundamentally, Babylon 5 (which I was quite a fan of at the time) is the same.
Of course, big-budget sci-fi generally costs a lot of money and has to please its largest market. That's understandable from a commercial point-of-view, and they're free to do this; it just doesn't resonate that much with me. Actually, I don't think it's the idea of American sci-fi I hate per se; rather it's that sci-fi is generally American by default. That, and the genre's predilection for cheesy dialogue, wooden acting and visual cliches. I could fill another post with that though
This poll is flawed anyway, because it's not absolutely clear that clicking on one automatically casts a vote. I clicked both to see what they were about, and discovered that I'd already "voted" for HD-DVD. FWIW, I don't know either way, so I wouldn't have voted at all.
...why they would name a format (Blu-Ray) with a name so close to the English word "blurry". The subconscious connection is too easily made, IMHO That's not to mention the other obvious (to me anyway) misinterpretation. Who is Ray, and why do we care if someone blew him?Come on.... it's staring you in the face. I can't believe they didn't consider that one.
# A man lives at the corner of the street,
And his neighbors think he's helpful and he's sweet,
'Cause he never swears and he always shakes you by the hand,
But no one knows he really is a plastic man. #
# He's got plastic heart, plastic blood and veins
(Yeah, he's plastic man)
He's got plastic knees and [eh, sod this I can't make it rhyme and Ray Davis is going to sue me]. #
Okay; you got me there, you evidently know more about the 2600 market than me :-) Interesting insight, BTW....
:-)
Though, yes, I'm sure that the *old* machines continued to sell in small but steady quantities, but the Lynx and the Jaguar (and the Falcon) were not roaring successes. And the marketing of those old machines was very much on the "milking" side; e.g. when they launched the XE Games System (based on the 65XE, a 400/800/800XL-series machine in a new case), they just relaunched it with three or four-year-old games. Not exactly competing with Sega and Nintendo in the console market.
And they sold the XEGS instead of the 7800 here (in the UK) after changing their minds.... although circa 1989/90, I saw the 7800 on sale in some places anyway (don't know what was going on there). The XEGS was never a major success, but then it was really just a cheap repackage of their existing line.
The Lynx was a great machine; despite its battery problems, it might have done well if it had been marketed better.
Then they released the Falcon, a pretty powerful successor to the ST line which was nonetheless clearly destined to fail; even at the time (1992) this was obvious.
Then they stopped making the Falcon after... not very long so they could concentrate on the Jaguar. And IIRC that suffered from delays; it might have done reasonably well prior to the PS if it had left the gate on time, at full speed. Obviously, it didn't
The two years that you mention were during that market's heyday. That statement belies the fact that Atari sold 40 million 2600's, and probably about as many computer systems. Atari could sell, they just couldn't execute new products after their original line. Yes; I originally intended to qualify that with something like "from the mid-80s onwards". Although the ST did enjoy some reasonable success in Europe until the Amiga was cut to a much more reasonable price (and it remained the de facto standard music computer until well into the 1990s).
So, when you say "let consumers" decide, do you mean the mainstream users or Linux enthusiasts?
If it's the latter, then Dell aren't going for that market. If the former, then what most of them want and will expect (as others have pointed out) will be the ability to run Windows software without major hassle.
Although theoretically WINE is a solution to this, in practice (as others have said repeatedly throughout this thread) it is far too complicated and not reliable enough for people who "just want to run" their windows apps. If it's sold on this basis, then it's going to backfire horribly.
According to this definition, the Netherlands isn't part of Central Europe. Meeehhhh.... the definitions aren't precise anyway, nothing worth arguing about I guess. I think the GP probably meant more like the Czech Republic (AKA Czechia) - which is what I would consider Central Europe- where another poster said ICQ was popular.
If you (a) give money to charity, but (b) also kick a cute puppy each month, then you're right that it doesn't matter whether your employer is worse than the Mafia, or the kindest people on the planet. You'll look good next to the Mafia-alikes, and bad next to the other guys, but your own standards shouldn't change. You're doing the same thing in either case.
On the other hand, if you're screwing your employers, it's not the same. It's screwing over people who can- and will- do whatever the hell they want to other people whether it's right or wrong because they can get away with it, versus screwing over the salt of the earth. Now, your ethical standards may demand that you treat everyone equally, regardless of their actions, but mine don't; and it's notable that the concept of "punishment" doesn't either. Locking people up in prison only if they've done something "wrong" is selective.
You may (rightly) argue that the law should be the only method of punishing wrongdoing (or perceived wrongdoing). However, the law is not perfect and often works out as "what you can get away with". You can bet that the evil Mafia-like employers will exploit this to screw over their employees, so why shouldn't the position be reversed?
Anyway, this is verging towards one of those up-its-own-arse pseudo-logical keyboard-authority Slashdot discussions on morality, so I think I'll stop myself there.
And if your employer really *is* the Mafia, it's probably not a good idea to screw them over